Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia

Dana Wildsmith

~ANA ~LDSMITH (July 17, 1952- ) Poet Dana Wildsmith was born in Macon, Georgia. She grew up in rural Georgia , the daughter ofa Methodist minister who was a social activist. She married at nineteen and attended Tusculum College, the University ofTennessee, and Virginia Wesleyan College, moving as often as her husband's duties with the Navy required. She graduated from Virginia Wesleyan College with a B.A. in sociology in 1986. She and her husband now live in north Georgia on her family's land, where their home is a one-hundred-year-old converted cotton barn. She has worked as a writer, an editor, and a workshop leader throughout the Southeast. She has been a poetry fellow with the South Carolina Academy ofAuthors, a reader for Kalliope: A Journal ofWOmens Art, and an artist-in-the-schools for the South Carolina Humanities Council. She has taught through the University of South Carolina's Creative Retirement Center , as well as the Tennessee Mountain Writers Conference, and the Appalachian Writers Workshop. She says, "I might never have begun writing poetry again (after my teenage poems of angst) had I not gone to the Appalachian Writers Workshop at Hindman [Kentucky], where Jim Wayne Miller saw my poems and spoke to me about them. I feel a heart-connection to Kentucky , which plays itself out in my writing." She has also studied with Fred Chappell and Jonathan Williams at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Wildsmith has two chapbooks-Alchemy, published by the Sow's Ear Press in 1995, and Annie, winner of the Palanquin Press Chapbook Competition in 1999. Iris Press has issued her audiotape of poems and commentary , Choices (1997). Her first full-length collection of poetry is Our Bodies Remember. OTHER SOURCES TO EXPLORE Poetry: Our Bodies Remember (I 999), Annie (I 999), Alchemy (I 995). 602 ...